Many people across the world are celebrating the beginning of a new year today, and some are thinking about New Year’s resolutions – how to improve ourselves, be better persons, take on new projects, hobbies, or change some habits. Maybe you would like to be more compassionate and understanding with other people. This worthy goal requires the complex and intricate human competency that we call empathy. But what is empathy? What does empathy mean?
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, empathy is “the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation.” Empathy is the competency I rely on when I try to put myself in your shoes and understand what it is like to feel like you do from your point of view. This meaning of empathy is so familiar that we might take its existence for granted. However, as it turns out, the history of the word ’empathy’ in the sense we use it today is fairly recent and can be traced to the ideas of one man.
The English term ’empathy’ dates back to the beginning of the 20th century, when it appeared in a 1909 translation of the German concept ‘Einfühlung’ that literally means ‘feeling into’. The work from which this word was translated was that of Theodor Lipps – a German philosopher and psychologist. He took the already existing concept of ‘Einfühlung’ that was predominantly used in 19th-century German aesthetics to convey the human ability to ‘feel oneself into’ a work of art and applied it to human relationships.
And so, “the now ubiquitous association of empathy with interpersonal relationships can be largely traced back to Lipps’ work.”* Today, we take it for granted that one can empathise with someone. But, as it turns out, only a little more than a century ago it would have made a lot more sense to empathise with a painting, for instance. What’s more – it took one man’s ideas to gradually change how we think about empathy. That is one inspiring thought to consider while reflecting on this year’s resolutions.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Maya Angelou
keep exploring!
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Featured image credit: Photo by W W: https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-wooden-planks-889839/
*Source: James Jardine “Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person” (Springer: 2022), p. 70.
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